My Body, My Microbiome: Microbes outnumber cells, but what are they doing?

Abstract

The human body is a microbe's playground: interspersed among the 37 trillion cells of the human body are at least ten times as many bacteria, fungi, viruses, and archaea. That amounts to 100 times as many microbial genes as human genes. Although the benefits of microbes were not unknown to science, the human microbiome's importance, and in some cases its… (More)